A managed network (e.g., an enterprise network) often includes a large number of machines and devices configured to perform a wide variety of functions. The amount of computing assets and the amount of data generated and used by these computing assets scale rapidly with the size of the network. Map-reduce operations on a network, such as collecting real-time information regarding systems and resources in the network and dynamically modifying and reallocating resources and data in the network, require a substantial amount of computation and communication resources.
In a centrally managed network, a central management server is responsible for issuing requests (e.g., requests for status updates, system management operations, and network management operations, etc.) to the targeted destination nodes in the network. These requests often take a long time to propagate through the network to the appropriate destination nodes. These latencies make real-time management of the machines in the network difficult. In addition, in a centralized managed network having thousands of targeted destination nodes, the central server can quickly become overwhelmed by the communication load and becomes a management bottleneck. Furthermore, a centralized management scheme is expensive to implement and maintain.
Some conventional systems attempt to ameliorate the problems of a centralized management scheme by performing some degree of aggregation or processing of data at intermediate control levels, resulting in a fixed hierarchical management structure between the network administrator and the end nodes. These systems also do not scale well, and these fixed hierarchical management structures themselves are difficult and complex to create and maintain, and are prone to problems and failures.
Previously, self-organizing linear communication orbits have been proposed to address the problems of the single server-based or hierarchical management structures described above. For example, in a distributed network where individual machines are self-organized into a linear communication orbit, map-reduce communications, such as those involving transmission of a question (e.g., a request for status updates or system management operation) and collection of a response for the query (e.g., an answer to the request for status updates or execution result of the system management operation), travel from one machine to the next along the linear communication orbit, while the aggregation of the responses are performed by each machine at its local level without the participation of any upper-level server(s). This provides fast and efficient communication in network management.
As described in the Related Applications, machines in a managed network may implement a set of rules that cause individual machines to directly interact with only a small number of machines in the network (i.e., a local neighborhood within the network), while the independent local actions of the individual machines collectively cause the individual machines to be self-organized into one or more communication orbits without global control or coordination by a server or an administrator. Such linear communication orbit provides a network management configuration that scales well, and makes real-time network management more feasible for large enterprise networks.